on Mahmoud's Hall (students for a free, free Palestine, #2)

i.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that I count myself lucky to be a PhD candidate at a school that houses thinkers more likely to be critical of these sins of the university, and the academy writ large. Today, I would like to walk that back a little.

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Opposite the encampment on South Lawn, there is a solidarity banner where staff have been encouraged to sign their names. I can’t stop walking past this banner, returning to it, scanning an eye down the list as it grows. My dismay swells even as the banner starts to run out of space, because there are so many names I don’t recognise, yet so few of the names I most want to see — those of the academics in my discipline.

An open letter, penned by staff at Monash University but directed at universities in so-called Australia more generally, is published by Overland. This, too, I return to obsessively, repeatedly, CTRL+F for “Melbourne”. I also search for Unimelb For Palestine’s updates on Instagram and Twitter (now X, but I refuse to give Elon Musk the satisfaction), and scan through the users that have liked the posts, hoping to see familiar names. I keep looking for evidence of sociologists being loud and proud and unashamedly for Palestinian liberation, and coming up short.

It is my training as a sociologist that has shaped me into a scholar-activist, and I cannot even fathom being one and not the other. I am struggling to come to terms with the fact that this is not necessarily the case for my peers.

I tell my psychologist how alone I feel as a tutor, that I am too scared to request advice on how to address Isr*el’s genocide of Palestine in our classes, in case I find out that I am in fact alone in the view that it is core to the subject matter of the courses we are teaching as sociologists; that it would be academically dishonest and morally and politically bereft of us to keep not speaking about it. I do not expect to cry as I explain this, but my body cannot help but give in to the deep anxiety it has been struggling to contain. I am learning that I have taken it for granted that sociology lends a person ethical commitments, and this, it turns out, shatters me.

ii.

I write this to you from Mahmoud’s Hall. Mahmoud Alnaouq was twenty-five years old. Mahmoud was the same age as me, and, if not for Isr*el’s air strikes on Gaza, would have been a fellow University of Melbourne student; I might have studied besides him in this very building. Mahmoud will now be younger than me, for eternity.

Beside me, there is a “notice to all persons in Arts West building” — a direction for all persons “occupying” the building to leave the University’s grounds, a command to end “significant disruption to normal University business.” I laugh at the University taking issue with occupation, with disruption to university business, as if Isr*el is not currently enacting a brutal military campaign in lands widely recognised as Occupied Palestinian Territories; as if it isn't the case that — and I repeat myself here — Gaza no longer has universities. It is cognitive dissonance on an institutional scale, dissonance that is only hardening in the face of students’ attempt to expose it.

In case anyone is wondering, I feel safe here.* There is chatter both from inside the building, and out; somebody is playing a guitar and singing. Flags and banners have been hung from the central staircase; there are a few tents and fold-out chairs on the ground floor, though certainly not obstructing the entrance. Outside, campus security representatives, wearing fluorescent yellow vests, have been instructed to take down the names of any person entering the building, but two students are piping up every time they move to do so: “You don’t have to give them your name!”.

iii.

Oh, to be a first-time tutor, facilitating a classroom discussion on decolonising the university. I am sleepless the night before my final tutorials of the semester, wondering how best to enable, support, perhaps empower, students to critically engage with the movement for Palestine liberation — within the limits of my knowledge and my role as an educator, and simultaneously, beyond the scope of the lecture content and the assigned readings. [The subject coordinator speaks of Isr*el’s colonial violence against Palestine only in passing, to my disappointment, to my disbelief.] I choose my words carefully, scripting out a context-setting spiel that I can use to open the class: I want to acknowledge that our conversation today, on decolonising the university, is taking place in the context of a very live and perhaps contentious discourse unfolding on this campus, outside of this classroom.

The students are discerning. When I frame the student activism as engaged in difficult questions about settler-colonial violence, land, occupation, sovereignty, and decolonisation of our University in particular and universities in general — they seem to understand that I am describing questions, but equally, making a statement. Later, I hear them chatting about, critiquing, the University’s response to the encampment and the sit-in. One student points out that the University imposes rules on what staff can and can’t say in class, looking to me to confirm; in that moment, we are in solidarity.

iv.

The union texts me on a Friday afternoon — students needs us for a snap rally, today — and I respond. It seems the least I can do. I power-walk to campus, heart thrumming, wondering if the University has really done it now; called the police on its own students, for a protest movement that it will no doubt memorialise / co-opt / re-engineer in its archives.

Professor Chris Healy addresses the crowd and reminds us that if the University’s defensiveness about its defence contracts, its partnerships with arms manufacturers, is on the basis of academic freedom, then it is ignoring that academic freedom has always had its limits. He points out that, for example, the University has already divested from tobacco; similarly, he calls attention to the ethics processes that put constraints on research projects. Academic freedom does not mean anything goes.

Drummers guide us as we shout: cut the ties now, now, now, now.

*This is not to undermine students who, unlike me, do not experience this space as one of safety — I don’t mean to refuse their perspectives. Nevertheless, as I have contended before, I also think we too often conflate safety with comfort. To be made to feel discomfort is not akin to being unsafe.